Part 7

The year that Rarick instructed his chauffeur to enter his office at precisely the stroke of four, and, regardless of who or what might be present, hand him his hat, the force began to refer to him as “the old man.”

As a matter of fact, it was Rarick’s conclusion that these few precious hours of late afternoon which included the sedative one of twilight, if properly induced, could be made to stack upon the credit side of health and vitality.

His golf consisted of those hours spent in the forest-like silences of his library, where he read little, if at all, but where glyphs and triptychs; helmet and sword of Doge’s guard; “Virgin and Child”; Auvergne art of the fifteenth century; pillars of stone decorated in Roman cups; red velvets inlaid with heraldic leopards, played effect after effect into his solitude.

He could sit in the dim splendor of this hall, and out would creep the mood to empty his pocket of its strange fires of stones of the earth and place them in smoldering rows along a strip of black velvet which he kept concealed behind the cushion of a divan. Out of his organ, “Father’s Folly,” there came pouring to his pressing of a button the storied action of “Tosca” or “La Bohème,” told in the illuminated stained glass above the triple grin of keyboards. Musical cataracts that leaped in glory over the din of a day that had been lived to the tune of dishpans, hair-nets, lingerie ribbon, and forty thousand small dolls made out of imitation peach-skin from the Vermont factory. Countless and ever-fascinating devices lurked within the Gothic maw of this pretentious instrument. Symphony orchestras, Japanese bells, xylophones, bird-notes, and cymbals. Violin solos, sextettes, octettes, “Chimes of Normandy,” Bach, Verdi, Guilmant, Handel, Saint-Saëns, Bonne, Mendelssohn, and a reproduction of the Vatican choir, with the lifted faces of the singing boys rising chastely above their surplices and glowing softly into stained-glass flesh.

To Rarick, who scarcely knew his son, there was something of Avery in these pale soprano boys, a look of spiritual contact, until he invariably jerked himself away from a comparison that, no sooner made, seemed ridiculous.

Avery, indeed! Speed-boats. Plus-fours. Oriental-pearl studs at seventeen. A growing suspicion that all was not open and above board about his college had been Rarick’s. Something not quite _bona-fide_ about what Avery had to say about his life there----

The suspicion moved up a notch at the sight of his boy, standing in the French-flannel dressing-gown, with the contents of his open bag scattered about the room, and the plane surface of his lean, pale face plastered with a look of panic that was positively grotesque as his father leaned in at the door. The flash of Jenny’s sable coat, as she sped down the hall, had not been lost upon him, and now there came to him rather belatedly the consciousness that he had been hearing the dim patter of her and Avery’s voices all the way along the corridor.

The thrill that he invariably experienced over this narrow young person he called son, shot through him before his first resentment had time to leap out.

Good youngster! A bit too thin. Needed filling out. A bothered look to him. What made him gape like a fish that had just been landed, hook and all? The scent and the echo of Jenny still lay on the air. Conniving again, filling Rarick with a roiling sense of outsider in his own home. Heads together, the two of them had been shutting him out. Some scrape had brought him home, no doubt.

“Well, Father, here I am.”

The little man stood in the doorway, shoulder-high to his seventeen-year-old son, head up, hand thrust into the groove between his coat buttons. After all, your prisoner was innocent until you proved him guilty. Illness, or whim, or unavoidable difficulty might have brought Avery home. Surely he would not dare to be showing himself in the midst of a school-week, for some of the nonsense frivolities Rarick had come down hard against, such as Jenny’s plans for the social divertissement of the youngest set.

“This is a surprise, boy. At least to me,” he could not help supplementing.

Hang it! Why had he added that? It threw the boy still further off his ease.

“I guess it is sort of a surprise to me, too Father. Hadn’t particularly planned on coming, until I found myself driving down. One of those decisions a fellow kind of makes for a long time without knowing he’s doing it. All of a sudden it’s made! If you see what I mean.”

“I see,” said his father, in the polite tones of not seeing at all.

“Will you sit down, Father?”

The boy did have oyster-shells under his eyes. Ill-health? Dissipations? Well? What?

They seated themselves, facing each other, on two straight chairs. It occurred to Avery miserably, as he swept one of them clear of a litter of his belongings, that he and his father were forever facing each other on straight chairs.

With his tongue as thick as a rusk in his mouth, the determination to unbend came flooding over him. A fellow had a right to some kind of a decent break with his father. Old gentleman wasn’t God. Regular enough fellow, no doubt, if you once broke through the crust. Crusty with crust, though, no doubt of that. Low-down of mother, to leave him flat--but here goes.

“You see, Father, here’s the situation,” began the son of Rarick.

They were going to get on! Sometimes a man and his boy just naturally came to a place where they began to get on. Avery was old enough now to understand....

“I’m mighty anxious to hear it, son.”

Now that was a handsome enough beginning of the old gentleman! Many a fellow and his ‘gov’, after starting it off on the wrong foot, had hit a pace. Not a bit improbable but what the old gentleman might be the one to understand more quickly than anyone else, that a fellow needs to somehow--get his balance. God, though, could anyone understand, except the fellow himself who was living through this particular hell?

“The situation is this, Father.”

“Yes, son.” Patience. Patience. Shouldn’t expect a lad to come directly to the point like a business man. What the dickens was the trouble with him? Bothered looking boy, no doubt of that. Well, it was a good time to get at him. This fine, straight fellow on the chair before him was his son. The pleasurable years were about to begin. The time had come to draw this boy into his life. This boy was no stranger. This boy was his!

“Yes, son?”

“The situation is this, Father.” What in the name of Heaven was the situation? Sitting there, facing his father, frantic for point of contact, now-or-never blazing in his bright blue eyes, words seemed to log-jam back in Avery’s throat.

You didn’t sit opposite one of the titan business men of the country--of the world, for that matter--and tell him that your soul was hurting you. You didn’t sit opposite the director of a string of banks, a merchandise king of two continents, the biggest individual dispenser of pins, Eskimo pies, and ink-erasers in the world, and tell him of the strange torments, the nervous panic, the despairs, the ecstasies, the strange stirrings of the desire to love and be loved, or the yearnings for some power to express the wonder and the pain of those first faint stirrings. You didn’t sit opposite a small, literal man called your father, whose ideals were as well hung as his paintings, and tell him that the world was a manhole into which you felt yourself falling. It was one thing to pour forth these torments and ecstasies and lonelinesses into your journal, which locked, or into the trunk of verses that were your own disembodied nerves, jangling away for dear life. It was another to sit facing this small remote man, your father. “The situation is this, Father.” What in God’s name was the situation? One did not dare to say to one’s father, “Life is too much for me, Dad.” One did not quite dare bring to the point of discussion the curiously recurrent thoughts of the lips of women that were flashing through his torment ... the desire to create ... the desire to live beautifully ... the need to be alone to work it all out. The confusion ... somewhere there was a father to understand ... not this father. And yet--strange little man--he liked his organ with the horrible stained-glass operas. The fires in the stones of the earth had witchery for him. The salty wisdom and humor of the old fossil he kept up in the yellow suite tickled and delighted him. What the devil was the truth of this man, his father? What the devil was the truth of himself, Avery, sitting there in torment, idiotically repeating over and over again, “This is the situation, Father.”

“Go ahead, son.”

“As I had been saying to mother, just before you came in, or rather, it’s been running through my mind....”

He and his mother had had their heads together as usual. She had been first in his confidence. This was the method cooked-up between them, of approach to the ogre. Damit! Jenny was a good mother, a more successful parent than he was, no getting around that; but a man was entitled to the first-hand confidence of his boy!

Was the old gentleman stiffening already?

Damit! damit! this boy was his. The only thing on earth he could look to train into being closely and intimately his. There were a hundred things he needed to begin to get said to this boy, if ever they were to begin to prepare for the intricate problems that lay ahead for both of them. A good way to begin was to give in. Why not on the speed-boat! That was what he was most probably wanting. Damned dangerous playthings of the rich. Speed-devices for going nowhere. Things. More things to alienate him from the power to be tranquil. The way to get at these youngsters, though--Jenny had the right idea--was to give them things. Things. The way to get at Avery was the way of indulgence. Youth wants indulgence.

“Well, I suppose if there is something you want, son, you’re beginning to be of an age now where you’ve got to depend on your own good judgments.”

“That’s mighty fine of you to say, Father.”

“I sometimes have my own ideas about these things, Avery. Some day, when you don’t have to get back to college, we’ll take time off and----”

“But, Father----”

“--talk some of these things out. We haven’t ever had much to say to each other about you and your relationship to this big world you are preparing to grapple with. It’s a bigger and more complex world than falls to the lot of most youths. I’d like to talk to you along those lines----”

“But, Father, that’s not what I want to ta----”

“It’s all right, son; I understand this may be a bit premature. No hurry. I think I know what’s brought you down from college today. Want you to start back this afternoon.”

“But, Father----”

“Don’t like sloppy attendance. Don’t like sloppy anything. Wait a minute. Hold your horses. You’re going back with what you came down for. I don’t like speed-boats, as a general rule. Don’t like speed-devices in general, when they’ve no other purpose than saving time that you don’t know what to do with after it’s saved. Nerve-racking. Extravagant. Dumb. But I figure you’re getting to an age when your own judgments should count. I’m glad to give in. Is that all right with you, son?” said Rarick, and took out his check-book.

They sat there, knee to knee, in their straight chairs, their faces seeming to swim together as twilight came to blur them. Rarick, a sudden sliding blur to his son; Avery, a sliding blur to his father.

“Is it all right, son?”

“It’s all right with me, Father--if it is with you--I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I mean--it’s all right with me, Father--if it is with you----”

The pen of Rarick began to splutter along his check-book.

The consciousness had long since begun to dawn upon Jenny, in whom the impulse to climb was an acquired, rather than an inherent characteristic, that she had started off, socially speaking, on the wrong foot.

The advent of the John G. Raricks, from out of the Middle West, had not been a planned campaign, for the reason that the need for strategy had simply not occurred to her until the propitious moment had passed and the house of Rarick had settled. Subsequently her mistakes had been fast and successive. After the dust of the publicity attending the purchase by John G. Rarick of the famous Ficke mansion had been laid, Jenny, appalled by the lull, had snatched, with more nervousness than diplomacy, at old relationships, mostly families of wealth and no particular social position, whose migration from the Middle West had preceded theirs.

Thereafter, the Raricks bobbed about in uneven waters, sometimes riding up to quite a social crest, but in an erratic, unstable way that was precarious, and then, just as likely as not, sliding down again into the valleys between the waves.

No gainsaying the fact that the Raricks were invited to six houses outside the social register for every one within. Jenny’s awareness of social-register discriminations did not even begin to dawn upon her until well after the move, when that dawn came up like thunder.

The time was not slow in coming when she was to encounter the difficulty of rounding up a formal dinner composed of the people she came gradually to realize were the right ones, and when she was to scorch under such mortifications as sending out thirty-six invitations to the alleged right ones and have twenty-eight regrets come home to roost heavily upon her heart.

It was not exactly in the spirit of snubbing. The Raricks were not sufficiently in the running for that. It was just that in settings where even great wealth required proper exploitation, the Raricks had somehow not arrived right.

What brought this home with sudden acuteness to Jenny was the fact that the Isaac Slocums, whose wealth and social connections back in the St. Louis days, when they were neighbors in Westmoreland Place, were comparatively negligible, had moved East considerably after the Raricks, and were now moving securely and consistently in social circles which Jenny achieved only sporadically.

Betty Slocum’s careful social sense had accomplished that. She had planned ahead. She had surveyed, and ended by employing, at a vast sum, the services of a woman of impeccable social position, whose chief financial resources flowed in bountifully in return for achieving a wedge for the socially ambitious. One of Jenny’s sources of undying regret was the fact that at the time such services would have been invaluable to her, she had never even heard of the Slocum method of crashing the social gate.

There was no going back. The best that could be hoped for was less uneven sledding.

The mistake had rebounded most cruelly on Jennifer. Passionately Jenny had wasted heartburn on the futility of wishing that Jennifer and Avery had been born to her in reverse order. An eligible son, somehow, millions in his offing, would have accelerated social matters. As it was, Jennifer, always popular, whirled nevertheless in three worlds. A Bohemian one which her set invaded in “slumming-parties”; an outer-fringe one which represented wealth and perhaps a bit too much gayety; and, far too occasionally, the one within the walls which the Slocums had scaled by careful maneuver and which Jenny had mistakenly planned to hurdle by a running high-jump.

It was not, Jenny felt sure, that Rarick money could not have accomplished anything that Rarick money set out to do; it was that Rarick money had not taken its psychological moment.

These realizations began to marshal themselves into Jennifer’s younger and more nimble mind the first year that she was out of Miss Pratt’s School for Girls. To begin with, Miss Pratt’s School had been a mistake. The daughters of millionaires attended all right, but not the daughters of the socially-right millionaires. Jennifer kept a stiff and even an impudent upper lip about it all, but in the seclusion of talks with her mother those lips of hers could drag at the corners.

“Where do they get off, leaving us out! I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel to go to the Monkton-Beck’s cotillion. I thought cotillions went out with bustles, anyhow. But what do you bet they don’t forget father’s name on their Joint-Disease Hospital subscription list?”

“Let them get it!”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You know perfectly well Leila Monkton has as good as got you down for five thousand.”

Jenny did. “Well, just the same,” went on Jenny, whose eyes were heavy from a sleepless night over this same case of omission, “what can you expect? Your father never accepts an invitation of any sort. People don’t know quite how to approach us, the women of the family always either asking permission to bring another man, or attending alone.”

“Nonsense, Mother! Look at the Slocums. Does their old man ever show himself? Look at the Turpitzes. The face of the husband and father of that family has almost become extinct. Fewer and funnier husbands is the social cry of the hour. Bring your own gigolo. Don’t kid yourself along, darling, that’s not the reason we’re zero.”

In the inelegant parlance of her daughter, that was precisely what Jenny was doing, casting about within her troubled spirit for some sort of satisfactory explanation of a position that was hourly becoming more enigmatical to her.

“There’s nothing mysterious about it, Mother, we’ve treated the exact science of social climbing inexactly, that’s all.”

“But just the same, Jennifer, assuming that we are horrible people, with intellectual harelips and no ‘g’s,’ this is a country where money is supposed to buy everything.”

“And so it does, if you know how to go about spending it. Money will buy anything from a plush horse to an Aubusson tapestry. You’re out of luck if you go after the plush horse when Aubusson tapestries are the swanky buy. We should have employed a social, interior-decorator to keep us from making mistakes such as cultivating plush horses, like the Ben Wimans or the Maxfield Doons. Not that I would give one blondined Wiman hair in order to crash into the Monkton cotillion. But just the same, you’ve got to know your onions.”

“Do you know, I sometimes think,” said Jenny, contemplatively, and with the crinkled look of continuing to break her head for more satisfactory explanation, “that there’s such a thing as being too nice? There is nothing more ghastly than the hung-on smile of trying to be too amiable.”

“Perhaps, socially speaking, darling, we haven’t got ‘It.’”

“Nonsense!” said her mother, regarding her with tilted lids of admiration. “You have every kind of ‘It.’”

“Oh, I get by in a crowd. That is, if I can manage to care enough. I’m so damned half-baked! Even the desire in me to be something besides the thing I am is half-baked, or I’d go be it. I’ve got a brain, Mother.”

“Use it, Jennifer,” said her mother, regarding her through lids that were untilted now. “On Berry Rhodes.”

“You’re being disgusting, darling,” said Jennifer, and rose to her height, stretching as a cat stretches, one arm climbing over the other.

“Don’t be an idiot, Jennifer, you’re too intelligent.”

“In other words, the beautiful and reluctant daughter of wealth must jerk her family into social security by marrying the scion of a great family. What is a scion, anyway?”

“Jennifer, you’re being coy. It’s horrible.”

“Honestly, Mother, you’re the one who’s being idiotic,” cried Jennifer, and began to flush in waves.

“Berry is a person on his own, you’ve said so yourself. Why not come out and own you like him?”

“Why Mother, you pain and surprise me!”

“You’re not clever in the rôle of _ingénue_, darling. A little awful, in fact.”

“Well, all right, if you insist. He’s a bad boy, but I like him. God knows why, but I do.”

“You like him because you have the good sense to believe in my adage that it is as easy to fall in love with the right one as with the wrong.”

“That adage gives me shivers down my spine. But then, so does Berry.”

“Leslie Edgerton hasn’t asked you to her dance tonight because she loves you.”

“Mother, you continue to pain and surprise me.”

“Berry got you asked there. She must have thought it the better part of wisdom not to refuse.”

“It’s all off there!”

“Are you sure, Jennifer?”

“That’s the devilish part. I’m not.”

“Jennifer, there’s one thing I must say for your father. He never played for small stakes in his life.”

“There was all that talk that Leslie’s trip to Europe was a trip to Brooklyn to have a baby--Berry’s.”

“You know that if that were true, it would have been marry-the-girl at the point of the merciless Edgerton tongue!”

“Berry’s a queer, evasive devil of a darling-on-wheels. I don’t know where I get off with him.”

“Find out.”

“Of course he got me asked out to the Edgertons’ tonight, but I don’t give a damn. I’m going! With him. I like him, Mother. Hang it! I like him,” said Jennifer; and, and to add to the horror of the sound of her own voice giggling in a key beyond her control, the laugh petered out suddenly and became a thin cry. “He’s a bad boy, but, hang it! I like him.”

“You know perfectly well that he is better than the average would be in his position. He has everything, and besides, a clever girl can settle him down. Jennifer, if you would!”

“You mean if I could.”

“You can.”

“I will.”

The great-grandfather of Leslie Edgerton had once been governor of a Confederate state. It had cost the grandfather of Leslie Edgerton one million and a half dollars to run on a foredoomed ticket for President of the United States.

The father of Leslie Edgerton had married a Miss Henrietta Crosby, of Crosby, Connecticut, and had retrieved the million and many more by subsequently inheriting, by proxy of this wife, the Crosby watch-factories.

The paths of the Crosbys and the Raricks crossed occasionally, chiefly at Bailey’s Beach, public charity functions, bridges, bazaars, teas, and occasionally in a purely social way.

Jenny had ventured to include the Crosbys in what had been the largest dinner dance of the season, with which she had magnificently set the winter ball rolling the night after the opening of the opera.

The Crosbys had “regretted.”

Jennifer had cried, with her usual irrelevant questionnaire, which she hurled, while smarting, at such situations, “Where do they get off? The Edgertons don’t set my hair on fire.”

Be that as it may, when the Edgertons regretted, one of the high-water-mark hopes for their dinner had fainted within Jennifer and her mother.

Leslie had sat opposite Jennifer at a Hunt Club subscription-luncheon two days later, and made no reference either to the occasion of the dinner dance itself, which had caused talk because of its elaborateness, or to her regrets.

That had somehow rankled in Jennifer more than the original refusal. It was as if, with a preciosity that was chiseled thinly into her face and lay along the delicate arch of her brows, Leslie had set about wounding a wound.

A Rarick had never set foot on Parmley, where the Edgertons kept open house all winter on their enormous estates skirting Tarrytown.

Jennifer was about to set foot there now. A small, bizarre-looking foot, in a white-fur sandal that was mounted on a four-inch ivory heel.

* * * * *

Parmley ran back into the Pocantico Hills. The house itself rose off a cleared eminence in the heart of four hundred heavily wooded acres. A terrace, tiled in bright blue, shone around it like a lake. Marble stairs, flanked with balustrades and lions, led to the blue-tiled terrace from lower ones of green turf. The building itself was a long low one, of enormous width, no particular depth, and a whiteness to it as if a Mediterranean sun were perpetually beating down. Some wag had tagged it “Carnegie Library” because of this low width and the pairs of Carrara lions that crouched beside the four flights of marble staircases.